Jon Landau inducts Gerry Goffin and Carole King

"The first of this year's two inductees in this category are Gerry Goffin and Carole King. As songwriters, Gerry and Carole stand as a great bridge between Brill Building styles of the late '50s and early '60s, and the modern rock era. And the fact is, they started looking forward with their very first hit. In 1961, they wrote a little song called, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" It was the first great '60s record to be written from a woman's point of view, it was the first great ballad to be directed to a new generation, which was soon to be labeled Baby-boomers, and for some of the people in this very room, it was the first song they slow-danced to, made out to, and made love to. It was perhaps the first '60s song about which you, your girlfriend, or boyfriend said, "That's our song." And by the way, because it meant so much to so many, it is a song and a record, beautifully sung by the Shirelles, that will live on well into the next century. In 1962, the Drifters recorded their sublime "Up on the Roof," a song that expressed a sensibility that, a few years later, would be called "Sixties Idealism." And in 1963, Gerry and Carole extended that idealism with a romantically eloquent "One Fine Day." And then in 1965, they put themselves in the center of one of rock's most vital developments, the Phil Spector-Righteous Brother collaborations. One of the two songs they wrote with Phil was the classic, "Just Once In My Life," and the other was one of those great lost masterpieces, due for rediscovery in the '90s, a great song called "Hung on You." By the time they wrote "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals and "Going Down" for the Byrds, they'd helped to start an approach that would affect every singer-songwriter to come after them, and in a nice epiphany, in 1967, the closed the cycle they began with "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," with "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," for Aretha Franklin. But by then they had given us more than we could ever give back. Gerry Goffin and Carole King - two of rock's great writers."